Plato: The Founder of Dialectic (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 169 Plato: The Founder o] Dialectic. By Gustav Emil Mueller. (New York: Philosophical Library , 1965. Pp. xi -+-327.) This work is primarily an interpreter's exposition of Plato's many-sided concept of dialectic. Mueller finds dialectic in its several aspects the central and controlling principle which gives unity to Plato's thought. The concepts which successively arise, and which Plato seeks to reconcile with their correlatives, lead to more nearly compatible concepts which are also more adequate to experience. Thus, they successively embody the compelling values and ideal perfection of Being, the Idea. Dialectic, Mueller holds, is not to be confused with rhetoric or linguistics, "which are concerned with the external use of language as means of communication ." (This is reminiscent of the thrust of Mueller's earlier work, What Plato Thinks.) Dialectic, for Plato, is also found to be critical self-knowledge, reflecting every realm of discourse and experience. Dialectical anthropology is the impress or key to dialectical ontology and dialectical being, which is the human soul. From this stance three current misconceptions of Plato are to be rejected. Plato is widely viewed as an idealist. Mueller holds, however, that the ideal aspects of reality are not more real to him than are the material or physical aspects. Idealism is a one-sided abstraction, requiring an equally abstract realism as its complementary opposite. Both are necessary poles in a concrete dialectical situation. Mueller thus finds what he regards as idealism rejected in Plato. Significant to his argument is the fact that "Idea" is used by Plato in the singular, while words used for "ideas" (in the plural) are ousia, eidos, or gone. Ideas are for Plato ever in the process of transformation as they reflect and effect the realization of Being, the Idea. The second misconception is that Plato teaches that ideas are absolute separate forms. The forms are in phenomena. In this connection, Paul Natorp's Platons Ideenlehre is cited. Ideas are "visions of value" and "forms of vision." They are also referred to as functions or activities of and in the soul, through which experience is disclosed in various meaningful wholes. The third misconception to be corrected is that Plato is a dualist. "Plato is no dualist, as if the intelligible or ontological world had nothing to do with the sensory or material world; as if it were not Being which becomes, and as if Becoming were not eternally that which it IS I" The key to Mueller's treatment of these issues lies in his proposal that Plato must be understood as writing simultaneously on various levels of meaning, "as if the dialogue were a symphony of various instruments." "The apparent theme of the dialogue is never the real theme, which is always philosophy as dialectic. The logical argument is always by-play, subordinated to the dialectic of the whole." Grant this to have been Plato's method, and there is ground for holding that it was, and grant that Mueller has correctly placed various Platonic notions correctly in terms of this typolob'y, and the refutation of the above mentioned misconception comes off fairly well. If one should find cause to differ about the level to which such a statement as, "The many... are seen but not known, and the ideas are known but not seen" (Republic u his case would be weakened. The fact that knowledge of first principles stands supremely independent of phenomena #ore the perspective o/the one who is in possession o/such knowledge (Republic VII) seems difficult to accommodate completely to Mueller's Plato. If Mueller's approach fails to remove all of the ambiguities from Plato, it indicates the direction such an accommodation , were it possible, would probably take. To the contemporary discussion of the empiricist dimension in Plato, Mueller brings another stance from which to view the problem in its several aspects. Few men are more eminently qualified to discourse on dialectic. If he may at times be felt to have imposed a schema upon Plato which is not (at least not immediately) seen to be exhibited in the dialogues, he brings substantial enough evidence in support of his perspective to stimulate reflection along the...